A Companion to Pietro Aretino offers exhaustive yet accessible essays aimed at understanding this complex and fascinating author. Its scope extends beyond the field of Italian studies, and includes references to other European literatures, visual arts, music, performance studies, gender studies, and social and religious history. It explores multiple areas of Aretino’s literary and biographical identity: in particular, his religious writings and their fortune, his relationships to visual arts and music, and his fashioning of a public persona. The essays here included support the current scholarly trend that no longer considers Aretino merely as a pornographer, but interpret his work in the light of the contemporary religious debate and cultural crisis.
Contributors include Élise Boillet, Maria Cristina Cabani, Eleonora Carinci, Philip Cottrell, Giuseppe Crimi, Cathy Ann Elias, Marco Faini, Augusto Gentili, Harald Hendrix, Paul Larivaille, Chiara Lastraioli, Paolo Marini, Ian F. Moulton, Paolo Procaccioli, Brian Richardson, Angelo Romano, Deanna Shemek, Jane Tylus, Paola Ugolini, and Raymond B. Waddington.
Paola Ugolini, Ph.D. (2011, New York University) is Associate Professor of Italian at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of The Court and Its Critics. Anti-Court Sentimens in Early Modern Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Marco Faini, Ph.D. (2005, University of Urbino) is Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Universities of Venice and Toronto. He is the co-editor of Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy and Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Brill, 2019).
“encyclopedic in scope […] A major contribution to the field of literary criticism.”
Fabian Alfie, University of Arizona. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer 2023), pp. 690–691.
Acknowledgments List of Figures Timeline: Pietro Aretino in Context Bibliographical Abbreviations Notes on Contributors
Introduction Marco Faini and Paola Ugolini
Part 1 Selfhood and the Public Sphere
1 Inventing the Celebrity Author Raymond B. Waddington
2 Aretino at Home Harald Hendrix
Part 2 Criticism and Satire
3 “Pietro Aretino, the Ferocious Prophet” and Pasquino Chiara Lastraioli
4 Aretino and the Court Paola Ugolini
5 Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Aretino’s Ragionamenti Ian F. Moulton
Part 3 Arts
6 Aretino, Titian and the Painters of Venice Philip Cottrell
7 Veritas Odium Parit: Uses and Misuses of Music in Aretino’s Sei giornate Cathy Ann Elias
Part 4 Literary Genres
8 Pietro Aretino, Poet Angelo Romano
9 “A Knot of Barely Sketched Figures:” Pietro Aretino’s Chivalric Poems Maria Cristina Cabani
10 Aretino’s Theater Deanna Shemek and Jane Tylus
11 Under Aretino’s Sign: Forgeries and Imitations of the Scourge of Princes Giuseppe Crimi
Part 5 Religion
12 Prose and Theology in Aretino’s Religious Works Élise Boillet
13 The Three Hagiographies: Writing about Saints in the Age of the Council Paolo Marini
14 Itineraries of the Rhetoric of Images in the Religious Works of Pietro Aretino Augusto Gentili
15 The Fortune of Aretino’s Religious Works after the Council of Trent Eleonora Carinci
Part 6 Networks
16 Aretino as a Writer of Letters Paul Larivaille
17 Pietro Aretino and Publication Brian Richardson
18 Aretino as a Target for Criticism, and His Enemies from Berni to Muzio Paolo Procaccioli
Part 7 Afterlife
19 Aretino’s Troubled Afterlife Harald Hendrix
Bibliography Index
All interested in the literature and culture of early modern Italy, both advanced scholars and graduate and undergraduate students. Keywords: Pietro Aretino, satire, pornography, Venice, print, poligrafi, religion, Titian, 16th-century art, self-fashioning, anti-courtliness, poetry, chivalric romance, theater, music.